Microsoft's strategy for making sure your computer stays up to date relies on the brilliant assumption that you leave your PC on all night. I don't, possibly because I want to save the ice caps, but more likely because I'm very, very cheap. I also have this primitive belief that shutting down my PC will give it a chance to do a little housekeeping and let its poor transistors have a rest.

The Automatic Updates feature on Windows is set by default to go hunting for new titbits for the operating system at 3am, install any it finds and reboot your machine. If you're not planning to be at work in the small hours, you won't get the service.

So, you dig around in Control Panel to find the little blighter and change its feeding time to something sensible, like high noon. And then one day you're making a presentation to a room full of excitable suits. Suddenly, they're shouting, "Behind you, behind you!" Windows has sneakily sucked down a bellyful of updates, security updates and hotfixes and is threatening to reboot - and it's counting down. If you manage to stop it before it pulls all the blinds down, it'll sulk for five minutes and then have another go.

You need to slap down Automatic Updates again. Tell it: "Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them." This ought to be the default setting, and the final part of the instruction should obviously be "... you idiot". Perhaps Microsoft will fix it in a forthcoming release.

What are all these updates anyway? Well, some of them are fixes that stop nasty new worms. Some are tweaks, like the famous Update 833407 of February 2004 which removed two swastikas and a Star of David from the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font (get yours now!).

And some of them seem to be designed to assign your carefully nurtured peripherals to the scrapheap. This happened to me when I blithely accepted an update to Windows Media Player 10 which resulted in WMP cutting my MP3 player dead. I thought WMP 11 might fix the problem; how naive! Apparently I am the problem. WMP 11's error message has changed subtly from WMP 10's "I-don't-know-what's-up" shrug to something like "your-MP3-player-is-like-ancient-dude".

Now my PC is going "Psst! Wanna try IE7?" but I'm not falling for it. I hear that the new Vista version of Windows has something called Restart Manager which will - wait for it - shut down individual apps you're working with, mess with their mojos and then put them back up for you. Automatically! Because it's 3am, right? It's not like you're doing anything important.

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